Hugo Chávez just announced the suspension of enforced blackouts across the country. The rationing scheme was triggered by Venezuela’s electricity crisis. The suspension coincides with an increase in the reservoir levels in the country’s main dams…but also just happened to come a day ahead of the World Cup. Coincidence? Nah… Good news notwithstanding, don’t get…

By my watch, it’s 6:23 a.m. in Caracas. The Central Bank’s new solution to all our Forex woes – the "Transaction System with Foreign Currency Assets" (SITME) – is supposed to go into operation in just over two and a half hours. And they still haven’t published the "bands" – the upper and lower limits on…

INE’s May inflation report is out now. The headline number, 2.6% is a lot better than April’s, but still high: on an annualized basis, it’s still-climbing, and now over 30%. More politically sensitive than the headline number is the food category, which INE has on 3.3%, or a staggering 47.6% on an annualized basis. Is…

You know how, normally, each months’ inflation figures get published on the first working day of the following month? Right. Did anybody else notice that we’re eight days into June already and the May inflation numbers still aren’t out? Sure, Elías Eljuri talking airy non-sense about his hopes and dreams, that we’ve got. But an actual…

Setty captures the zany criminality that permeates everything about the massive Las Cristinas mine so well in this post, he makes all further comment superfluous. Added bonus: I can just about guarantee that, 10 years from now, his post is still going to be a fairly accurate account of the current state of play out…